LiveAndTell, A Crowdsourced Quest To Save Native American Languages

While you won't have any trouble finding a way to learn Spanish, French, or German in the United States, brushing up on your Lakota or Navajo isn't so easy.

The Endangered Language Fund projects that half of the languages spoken on earth will disappear in the next century, and Native American tongues are among them. The Administration for Native Americans reports that when the U.S. was founded, more than 300 Native American languages were spoken. That number has since dropped to 175, and only 20 are taught to children. The rest, it says, "are classified as deteriorating or nearing extinction."

In an attempt to preserve endangered indigenous dialects such as Lakota and Ho Chunk, South Dakota-based programmer Biagio Arobba has built LiveAndTell, a user-generated content site for sharing and learning Native languages. It can work for any language, but his passion is to preserve the endangered tongues you won't find in textbooks, language programs, or widely taught in classrooms. "For Native American languages, there's a scarcity of learning materials," Arobba says. "Native American languages are in a crisis and we have not moved very far beyond paper and pencil methods."

Arobba, 32, is a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe. He built LiveAndTell as an efficient, easy-to-use way to pass the Lakota Sioux language (and others) from older generations to younger ones. An accompanying Facebook page is intended to introduce the languages to a broader audience.

LiveAndTell lets users create "audio tags" for pictures, similar to tagging on Facebook or Flickr. An audio recorder allows a Lakota speaker to record a message with each picture. They can also post a series of audio or text below each picture. In essence, it’s Flickr meets Rosetta Stone. The pictures and album can be embedded into other websites as well. LiveAndTell has no upfront participation fees; users can sign in and start creating content immediately.

As LiveAndTell expands, Arobba is working with area tribes to integrate the website into tribal sites, and is running workshops so Lakota speakers can learn how to input photos, audio, and text. He's planning mobile versions for the iPhone and Android platforms. He's also collaborating with Oglala Lakota College and others to apply for National Science Foundation funding.

The potential for learning languages online is already vast: Wikiversity, a multilingual hub project of the Wikimedia Foundation, is building encyclopedic information in a variety of languages. Livemocha.com offers Gaelic (Irish or Scottish), among dozens of other languages. Babbel.com boasts more than a million users learning several languages, and has mobile apps to build vocabulary. And the ambitious Rosetta Project by the Long Now Foundation aims to document what it estimates as 7,000 languages currently in use, starting with 500.

Language market leader Rosetta Stone does have an endangered language program, which in Arobba's view, is useful, but limited, since it takes a long time to produce a small number of languages. There are currently a half dozen languages in the program, and each takes roughly two years to capture and produce. It also released a Navajo language program in 2010. A spokeswoman at Rosetta Stone said its products are scientifically grounded in the process of learning languages because their endangered language programs are led by "scientists, linguists, and people immersed in these cultures and languages."

In contrast, Arobba says LiveAndTell is organic and culturally enriching. "There is civic value in posting content," he says. "For the people posting the content, there's a cultural context there, too." Native speakers can take photos and record words depicting life familiar to the young people who are learning the languages in their own communities. It also doesn't require high production costs the way Rosetta Stone's programs do. "The main thing," Arobba says, "is just lowering the barriers and the costs for everybody."

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These languages cannot be saved just by the names of states, cities, rivers, or mountains. There must be language immersion programs on reservation schools. I have seen examples where they are being taught on reservation schools. They are doing original compositions in them, and what they learn can be transferred to college credit. These 300 languages are an American heritage, and if we lose them then we are losing a part of our heritage. Before they were rounded up and sent to boarding schools, where they were punished for speaking their native language. Now is the time to reverse this trend.

Couille, the numbers 20 / 175 are from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. They administer the funding established by congress. It would be great if you could get in touch with them, and tell them about your numbers. Here is their address: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/program....

Couille, all projects have trade-offs. Rosetta Sone has its limitations, and so does the LiveAndTell website. My comments are not meant to insult the hard work that the Rosetta Stone is doing. All too often I see language projects pit against each other, and that is the wrong tactic. To be honest there is more cooperation in tribal communities, and it's the linguists who argue amongst each other. Let's try to get out of that trap. I would like to personally say "thank you" Rosetta Stone for their efforts. (Thank you Rosetta Stone...and thank you Couille for your hard work. You are making a positive difference in the world.)

I do have some "constructive" criticism, though. Rosetta Stone should take responsibility for it's Endangered Language program when it comes to explaining the benefits AND limitations. Rosetta Stone is a big name in language education. What we need to do (here is the "contructive" part), is help people in the community identify good projects whether they are part of the Rosetta Stone project, or some other community project. At least we need to point people in the right direction "as a guide" (or guidebook). I do this all the time with anyone I talk to, whether a person is interested in the LiveAndTell website or not.

Can you imagine how many startup software initiatives are planned around being like Rosetta Stone? That is the wrong approach. LiveAndTell is more than word lists..it's an opportunity for instructors to offer pictures and audio with their lesson plans, with buttons right on to of the pictures. It's free to use and free to publish. Some of the fluent, indigenous teachers I work with have SmartBoards or Promethean boards in their classroom. All the better.

In addition to Rosetta Stone's Endangered Language Program (http://www.rosettastone.com/gl..., ...please check out the LiveAndTell website (http://liveandtell.com). To be honest, you will probably find it most beneficial if you are a fluent speaker of an endangered language, and an educator. Hopefully someday the website will have something for everyone. For now, it's a different approach, it's innovative, it's free publish, and it's free to use.

"That number has since dropped to 175, and only 20 are taught to children."Both of these numbers are most certainly wrong, even though the first one is up for a debate that I don't care for. But I am finishing up a dissertation on Native American language planning and I have found in my fieldwork that a majority of tribes are still teaching their language to their kids, if only in summer camps and after-school programs. The Rosetta Stone programs are slow going for the same reason everybody else's are... It's a non-profit with a team of 4, working for an in-depth language curriculum, whereas Live And Tell is only a series of word lists...Thank you for this article!

By training, I am a linguist. It's great to see ways of preserving the language for future research, and making it easier to learn endangered languages, both for their communites as well as for others who are interested. Hopefully many of these languages will be preserved, in the same way that Welsh has experienced a resurgence.